SEAVILLE — The genesis of a children’s book that helps modern parents and their young kids talk to each other was a pair of fraternal twins born more than 40 years ago in different counties — one at home on the bathroom floor and the other, a surprise, at a hospital.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michael P. Yourchisin of Seaville was prompted by one of those twins to write down childhood stories he told them and their “triplet” brother about “Aaron the Airplane.”
Yourchisin said that was his daughter Amy, who with twin brother Brandon will turn 43 in December. He turned the story into a children’s book, “The High Flying Adventures of Aaron the Airplane!”
He explained that their first-born, Michael, was 22 months older so having three young children that close in age was like having triplets.
As children are wont to do at bedtime, they would ask him to tell them a story. He made up Aaron the Airplane, which would fly around to see what the kids were doing and talk about what they did that day. After he told one sibling the story, the next would say, “Tell me about Aaron the Airplane,” and then onto the third.
“Sometimes Aaron the Airplane flew three different times to give each kid their own special story,” he said.
With all of the electronic games and gizmos distracting children now, telling a story takes on more importance because when parents get home and ask them what they did that day, they often get a single-word response: “Nothing.”
“It’s a children’s book that’s not really meant for the child, as much as it is to open a discussion between the parents and child about what they did that day,” he said. “I have that written in the preface pretty clearly coming down to explain how this story came to be. That was basically it. It opens a window to let parents talk to kids.”
The preface explains the story can be tailored to include whatever activities the children have been doing.
“The sharing of the day’s events becomes an inclusive activity between Aaron, children, grandparents and parents even when adult jobs and commitments preclude both parents from being involved in the day as you might have wished,” he wrote. “The story is yours to embellish and to create the world that best suits you and your child.”
Brandon comes as a big surprise
“She never knew she was having twins,” Yourchisin said about his wife, Katie.
“They didn’t do ultrasound back then,” Katie said, “and they (the babies) were anterior and posterior, so they only heard one heartbeat.”
On a Monday, Dec. 1, with the Pittsburgh Steelers on TV, Michael was in the kitchen doing dishes when he heard his wife cry out, “I don’t want my baby born in the toilet.”
When he got to the bathroom, the baby was crowning. “To the eyebrows,” Katie added.
“I lift her up as best I could and laid her down,” he said.
She told him to call the Upper Township Rescue Squad as little 22-month-old Michael was standing there, “listening to her semi-screaming, listening to me semi-screaming back, in his jammies, holding his teddy bear, and she is giving birth to a baby.”
Katie gave birth right there on the bathroom floor, but the rescue squad noticed there wasn’t an afterbirth so they left the umbilical cord attached and took her to Shore Memorial Hospital (now Shore Medical Center) in Somers Point.
As the Rescue Squad was prepping Katie for the trip to the hospital, Michael called his mom and dad and told them, “We had a healthy girl. She was born at home. I’ll call you later.” He called a few more people to tell them about their daughter.
After Katie got to the hospital, the couple got a big surprise.
“They breach-delivered a baby boy as blue as the cover of the book,” Michael said.
The twins were born an hour and 20 minutes apart.
“When I called everybody for the second time, I said, ‘I have a baby boy.’ They said, ‘You called me an hour ago and said you had a baby girl.’”
Amy’s birth certificate lists Seaville in Cape May County as her place of birth. Brandon’s birth certificate lists Somers Point in Atlantic County.
“As we were discussing names, we said if we have a girl, we’ll call her Amy, and if we have a boy, we’ll call him Brandon,” Michael said.
When the children were tagged in the hospital, Baby A was Amy and Baby B was Brandon.
He points to the book’s “genesis of having almost triplets in the pre-cell phone age, the pre-electronic age for a lot of people,” when parents read to children.
“When we got older, our daughter said, ‘Why don’t you put together the story you used to tell us?’ I wrote the manuscript the way I used to tell my kids. I hand-drew the pictures that I wanted to see of Aaron the Airplane far away and kids playing and the plane getting closer. They used my ideas of the pictures (in the book).”
“It’s short. It’s a silly book,” he acknowledges. “I had fun doing it. It’s kind of like a bucket list thing.”
“And our grandson loves it,” Katie said about Ozzie, to whom the book is dedicated along with their three children, who all went through Upper Township schools and graduated from Ocean City High School.
Ozzie, their only grandchild, is the son of Amy and her husband, a U.S. Army sergeant who was wounded in combat.
“Now I’m just pimping my own book,” Yourchisin added, laughing.
The book is available at Sun Rose Words and Music at 756 Asbury Ave., Ocean City, and online through amazon.com and other book-sellers.
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff